Satori

Finally I finished ‘Satori’, video and photographs exposed until end of December at the Center of Visitors in La Gomera. In the press section there are some articles about the exhibition and the I Biennial of Architecture, Art and Landscape of the Canary Islands where it’s integered.

‘Satori’ is a Japanese word that literally means ‘to understand’, and it’s used in the scope of the Zen and the Tantra to denominate a special moment of ‘illumination’ of the conscience. It is arrived through an intimate meditative process of communion with the world, without mediation of the thought. This way, an expansive movement begins that extends througout the borders of the ego, to get to experience a cathartic, oceanic feeling, of union with the Universe.

The search of this catharsis and this feeling of identification with phenomena of the Nature has been constant in my artistic trajectory. In my beginnings I oil painted tornados, giant storms and waves, not from the perspective of the romantic artist before a huge and ominous world, but from the point of view of the forces themselves. Later I began an abstract slope, in which I took advantage of my capacity for ‘involuntarily seeing’ the sounds in my mind (synesthaesia), so that I could ‘be’ for a moment a sound, or a music, and be able to represent those sonorous phenomena in the art, in a visual way. In this way I painted sounds of birds or I made computer animations of sounds of crickets, songs of whales or seconds of music by Wagner, Rautavaara or Sibelius.
With the present video I try to unify all this artistic trajectory in a concept that finally becomes aware of itself. Each part of this audiovisual work, that alternates real images with animations completely made by computer, is the artistic expression of a ‘satori’, a moment of deep understanding of here and now, in which the senses acquire an unusual protagonism and in which there is no separation between our ‘I’ and what it surrounds us. These meditative experiences take place in different scenes from the Canary Islands: Park Garcia Sanabria, where ‘we will see’ the sounds of the birds, the top of the Garajonay, in which we will be able to see through the eyes of a mosquito, or the Park of the Canadas of the Teide, scene of the deepest illumination that will give birth to the vision of a trip from the space towards the depths of the ocean.
The soundtrack is based mainly on musical work fragments of the composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, with whom I share a strong artistic tie. Rautavaara defined himself like a mystic after the search of a ‘oceanic feeling’. He is one of the most important contemporary composers, and without a doubt, the more ourstanding Finnish musician after Sibelius.
The work shown also with the video at this exhibition, a digital photography of 85 x 180 cm., is product of the union and digital elaboration of more than 80 photographies taken in the Park of the Canadas of the Teide, which conform a panorama of 360 degrees. The appropriation of the totality of the space and a moment of the time causes an expansive and global sensation, that helps us to participate with the underlying concept and the special atmosphere of the video ‘Satori’.